Mind Games

2

Pressure

‘Learn to push boundaries if it breaks down walls, but when others dictate your actions it’s time to take ten steps back.’

Asha Iqbal, mental health activist and honour-based violence survivor (@_socialdrone)

What really is pressure? Is it a self-made construct, forged in your own mind? Is it entirely created by external factors? Or is it, as seems most likely, a bit of both?

Pressure will always exist for a player – the key lies in managing it. You can control the self-made pressure, and football clubs, managers and supporters can control the external pressures. Only by getting all of these groups pushing in the same direction can you effectively reduce it until it no longer affects performance. Contented players feel far less pressure than those who feel the weight of expectation pushing down on them. It’s that simple.

Before an important, high-profile match it’s inevitable that you become aware that you and the rest of the team are carrying people’s expectations; you can’t escape that. But on a normal day you go to the ground to not let yourself down, then not let your family down, then not let the club down … and only then not let the fans down. That’s the natural order for most players, I think. And knowing that natural order allows you to reduce the pressure.

I used to say to myself, ‘Well, what else do you want to do?’ And the answer was always, ‘Nothing.’ I wanted to play football, I knew I could be successful at it, and I used that as a means of reducing the pressure on myself. On my debut for Bury, I got booed by my own supporters. We were playing against Wigan Athletic, and when I ran onto the pitch for the warm-up they shouted, ‘Fuck off, you’re fucking shit.’ I remembered that incident for a long time. Most people there trusted me, but there was a tiny minority who clearly didn’t like change and who already had their favourite goalkeeper. They really didn’t like the fact that I’d replaced John Forrest, the previous No. 1.

I can understand that – they didn’t know me and I was a nobody. That might cause some young goalkeepers to freeze. But honestly, I never let that stuff create any extra pressure on me. I’d come to Bury to see if I could make it as a professional footballer, and everything that happened from that point onwards was me proving to myself and others that I could do it.

Next I went to Everton, and the pressure could have increased at a bigger club in the First Division. But I reasoned that the worst that could happen was that it didn’t work out and I went back to Bury or similar, and the best that could happen was that I continued to prove that I could do it. And I knew which I wanted.

Some games are bigger than others, but I just made them part of the process too, because I wanted to play in those matches. If you sat down and overanalysed it, then that pressure might get to you; so you had to avoid that. You simply had to walk over the white line and play the match.

I understand the notion of big-game pressure and how it affects certain people. But for me, the bigger the game, the better it was. When you get to a certain level and play against lower teams, you’ve got to be ruthless and show that you’re better than them. But when you play against elite opponents, you just want to find out if you’re better than them. And when you play against them and you do prove that you are, you just want to do it again and again.

There’s also a need to compare your own situation with real-world pressures. I know that there are different types of pressure in the modern game with the money involved, that the players are expected to perform consistently and everything is televised. But real pressure is having no food in the house and the bailiffs knocking on the door. That has to put footballing pressure into some context.

Did I want to walk over that white line? Yes. Why did I want to walk over it? Because I enjoyed doing it and I knew that everyone in the stadium would cut their arm off to be in my position. That wasn’t pressure, it was an honour. Did I have my health and little in my life to worry about? Yes. So I was fortunate. At that point, you realise that going out and having fun was the key. As long as I prepared to the best of my ability, there was nothing else I could do. That’s a reason to remove pressure, not add it.

One of the best lessons I was ever taught about pressure was to laugh in the face of it. At Bury, the manager Jim Iley hired former Manchester United manager Wilf McGuinness as a coach, and he was absolutely brilliant with us. He was an excellent hands-on coach, but the best thing about Wilf was the way he could build your confidence with just a few words.

‘When you get into the team, centre-forwards are going to try and smash you,’ Wilf said to me. ‘There’s no reason for that, other than it’s what they do to try and intimidate you. If you just get up and laugh, they won’t know what’s going through your head. Just get up and don’t react. Just laugh at them.’

For goalkeepers, some situations can be intimidating, so you just have to rise above them. I remember playing Wimbledon in the FA Cup in 1993, and John Fashanu told me, ‘The next time you challenge me it will be your last.’ But again I just laughed it off. It was all part of his strategy to gain an advantage, and laughing at it was my strategy to do the same.

How much pressure you feel can also depend on your manager. Howard Kendall was the best manager I had at relieving it. When he was under serious heat at Everton during 1983/84, and close to the sack, he was brilliant at reducing the pressure on us. The training and team spirit were still good, but Liverpool were flying in the league and we were struggling to score goals, particularly at Goodison. Between the beginning of the season and the turn of the year, we’d played eleven league games at home and only scored seven times.

Howard came home after training one day and an Everton fan had spray-painted ‘Kendall out’ on the door of his garage. You saw other graffiti around the city with similar messages, and supporters were handing out leaflets outside home games demanding that the manager and chairman leave their posts.

But Howard never even mentioned the word ‘pressure’. Nothing changed. Sometimes when you’re under the cosh you can hear it in someone’s voice, the frustration that what they believe in isn’t working. With Howard, there was none of that. He was like a breeze. He would simply come in and stress the importance of enjoying ourselves. He was never one to harass the players to do better in a negative way, and he never shouted at us. Everything was just normal.

It’s really difficult at times, when you’re struggling, to make it a fun environment without looking like you aren’t taking it seriously. When times are hard, negative people tend to panic and look too hard for solutions that aren’t there. But Howard was able to trust his processes and trust his players. Of course, he occasionally tried new things on matchday and with team personnel, but he always stuck to his philosophy.

When things are going badly you expect change and upheaval. It’s really difficult not to panic when you’re personally under pressure. Everyone has their own way of dealing with it, but most people tend to get more stampy and aggressive. Howard was never like that. He believed that his methods and his philosophy could work, even if they took longer to succeed than most people thought they would.

The club was also good – that needs to be said. By keeping faith in Howard and being patient with him when things were going badly, it reduced the pressure on him, which in turn meant he didn’t pass any stress on to us. There were calls from the media and supporters for the club to make a change, but the chairman ignored them and just let Howard get on with it. We came through it, and we got our rewards by the end of the season. Those rewards were the prize the club and manager deserved for their perseverance.

That’s not to say that Howard wasn’t afraid to experiment. I remember we once had a comedian come into the training ground to try to lift our spirits. But it wasn’t so much what Howard did, as what he didn’t do. He didn’t rant and rave. He had answers for people who asked questions. The difference between him and Mike Walker was that Mike couldn’t answer the questions; he just told the players that they weren’t fit. With Howard, he’d always have thought about the potential questions that players and the media might ask, and he had serious, sensible answers for them.

We had a really good environment in the dressing room, and that has to help. Humour makes it easier. The dressing room is like an accident and emergency department, where you have cutting and dark humour – but you wouldn’t take any of that outside. It’s done to create an environment in which you can work effectively for the purposes of the job without focusing on the pressures on you to perform. If you’re inside, everything is up for grabs. But if anyone attacks you from the outside, everyone has your back and you rally round.

I spent six months trying to please Howard, because every time I came in after playing well he’d say, ‘Yes, but what about that kick or that throw-out?’ It drove me wild, but it motivated me into thinking that the only way to shut him up was to be better still. Then one day I came in and he gave me a compliment. My self-belief shot through the roof and any pressure that might have built up just dropped away. Brian Clough did the same with his players, because even a handshake from him would be enough to make them feel brilliant. It turned out that Howard knew me better than I knew myself.

Howard never said that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. If I wanted to do something, he let me do it – he trusted that I was always looking for ways to improve. But his management was proof that there are so many variables that can alter the pressure a player feels.

Over the summer of 1983, Howard had given all of his goalkeepers a chance to impress in pre-season matches. Jim Arnold and I had played a similar number of league matches the previous season, and I thought I had a good chance of being the No. 1 on the opening day. But when the team sheets were announced for the home game against Stoke City, Jim was in goal. With only one substitute allowed at the time, I had to watch the game from the stands.

But then I was very good at not letting things like that bother me. The biggest contradiction of my career was that I was motivated to the point of obsession about wanting to be in the team and play football, but if I wasn’t selected I was very philosophical about it and rarely got angry or bitter. Although I could have believed that the work I’d put in over the summer had gone to waste because I still wasn’t the first choice, that was never my thought process.

Instead, I reasoned that it was a message to tell me to work even harder and be even more focused on my own improvement. It was merely another challenge for me to overcome. The only way I could change the manager’s decision was by proving that I was better than Jim. I couldn’t change what had already happened; what will be, will be.

And it tended to work. On 1 October that first season, for an away game at Notts County, I was back in the team. I don’t think Jim had really done anything wrong, and we’d only conceded seven goals in our opening seven matches, but Howard often made calls like that based on his gut instinct.

Maybe if I’d gone a whole season without ever making the team, despite my hard work, I might have got a little more disillusioned at the lack of games I was being given despite being confident in my own ability. But every time I was left out of the team or suffered a setback, working doubly hard seemed like both the obvious response and the one most likely to succeed.

I think as a goalkeeper, the pressure on you is slightly separated from the team, and that probably allowed me to cope more easily. But it works the other way too. I played really well out in Holland in 1996 in a World Cup qualifier, when Wales lost 7–1. I had probably the best game of my career and honestly could have conceded twenty times. But despite being content with my performance, I couldn’t be outwardly happy because the team had been humiliated.

Although I could move on from mistakes, in the aftermath of them happening I’d be furious with myself. If I was on the way home from a match in which I’d made a mistake for a goal but we’d won, I could have run someone over. That’s an awful thing to say, but it’s true. It would take me until the following Monday to get over it and shut it away, even though I knew it was a stupid reaction. For me, it was the embarrassment of letting people down.

In those situations too, humour helps. I’d go into training on a Monday morning after conceding a goal or two at the weekend and the players would take the piss out of me – ‘You were shite on Saturday, Nev.’ OK, fair enough, I was. But then it was over. And if supporters or journalists ever gave me grief, then my teammates would defend me to the hilt. It’s when they weren’t taking the piss that you knew you had a real problem.

The toughest period was between getting home on the Saturday night and the Monday after a mistake, because you were frustrated and separated from the game. That frustration depended upon the result of the match, how the rest of the game went and who was in charge. Sometimes if we lost, you could reason that the manager had picked the wrong team, played the wrong system or made the wrong substitutions. But you learnt to quickly put it away, otherwise you’d only risk it leading to more frustration.

Yet being the goalkeeper meant that I felt impervious to the pressure that the manager and the rest of the team were probably feeling. Perhaps that wasn’t right. Maybe I should have been trying to gee everyone up more. But I was selfish, and I believed that being selfish was the only way that I could be successful. Being obsessed with my own preparation and my own performance was my main strategy for getting the best out of myself, and I figured that if the team weren’t playing well then that only made my own performance level more crucial.

Sometimes I didn’t care if the team all played badly together. Because if that happened, then the chances were that we weren’t a bad team, we’d just had an off day or the system wasn’t right – and these things can be addressed. The worst was if four or five first-team players were regularly having off days, because that increased the pressure on your own performance through no fault of your own.

As a goalkeeper, you aren’t really in control of how the team plays. You can obviously make a difference with your own saves – by giving your defenders confidence – and with your distribution, but that only goes so far. You can’t make things happen further up the pitch, and if you concentrate on trying to then you’ll probably make things worse, not better.

I couldn’t make the strikers score, but I could save shots and make sure that the worst we got was a 0–0 draw. And if the players in front of me knew that I was doing everything I could to keep a clean sheet, it reassured them because it took some of the pressure off. That sort of thing made a difference, even if it might have come from my own selfishness.

In our first thirteen games of 1984, we only conceded six goals. The strikers found their form too, and we set off on an unbeaten streak, winning eight times. From being booed by our own fans and Howard getting personal abuse, we relieved all the pressure on ourselves in the league – eventually finishing seventh – and went on a run in the cup competitions that eventually ended with us beating Watford at Wembley. I conceded one solitary goal in the entire FA Cup run.

For players nowadays, there’s obviously more cameras around, and everyone has a phone with a camera and will post pictures on social media. That leads to players feeling increasingly restricted in what they do and what they say, which threatens to create a claustrophobia and loneliness that ramps up the pressure you feel.

Everyone wants to see more characters in the modern game and bemoans the lack of individuality in the personalities of players, but it’s tricky because as soon as someone raises their head above the parapet they get hammered from a different section of the public or the media. Paul Gascoigne is the perfect example of that, with people leaving bottles of beer outside his house so that they can get a picture of him. Now that’s really sad, because it doesn’t help him.

I think everyone in the public eye has a shelf-life of being the one in the media spotlight, and therefore in the public’s consciousness too. That’s a really unpleasant reality, because it must be damaging to the mental health of those people who suffer the cycle of being built up and knocked down, and – because the focus is on a select, chosen few – also affects the confidence of top players who aren’t heralded at all.

When I was in good form but had an off day, I’d come home knowing that I’d played like shit. But I might look in the newspaper and read that I’d got ‘unlucky’ for the goal. That word was only used because the media liked me at the time, so they judged me by different rules than other goalkeepers. As footballers, when you’re young you get the benefit of the doubt because you have potential. Then you’ve got a long middle section, followed by a point at which you’re judged to be over the hill.

Now your performance level might not change much over your whole career, but the way in which you’re perceived does change. What once might have been considered to be ‘unlucky’ is later viewed as ‘clumsy’ or evidence that you’re ‘in decline’. You might have been be lauded for having a personality and some character, but that can be warped into you being a troublemaker or a loose cannon. And all this seems to be led by the media.

We’ve seen it time and time again with young English players, especially with Gazza. The media delighted in his antics because he was both brilliant at football and did foolish things that sold copies. He was the media’s hero until he was no longer at his peak and he wasn’t considered of use to them. They then removed that golden boy status and exploited his problems for their own gain. Just imagine how damaging that process is to someone’s mental health.

Gazza should have been working in a school like ours. Kids would have loved him to bits, because he has the sort of innocence and enthusiasm that would have made him connect with them. He loved to entertain as a player, and loved the idea that young kids were watching him and became inspired to play football by his example. He could have had exactly the same impact after playing, and it would have helped him mentally to cope with life without football.

It was the lack of football in his life that allowed Gascoigne’s problems to take hold; he had no structure without the game. But with that structure and with proper friends, not those who were out to play on his fame and exploit his wealth, he’d have been far better off. He should have been given a role working with youth teams and then out in the community interacting with kids through football, and he would have made a huge difference to so many lives because he has that innate ability to connect. Doing this would have given him a greater purpose in life.

Instead, he lost his structure and then suffered at the hands of a tabloid media that turned his struggles with addiction into front-page news to sell papers. At no point in that process did they ever reach out to him and offer help. He became their property without him asking for it.

Gazza is a high-profile and extreme example of someone who suffered without structure, but there are many others who have struggled with the same issue. It’s no different to normal life. If you’ve worked in a factory for thirty-five years, and one day you come in and, without warning, learn that it’s been shut down, then your purpose to get up in the morning has been ripped from you. How do you replace that? How do you cope?

Anybody that becomes popular will one day become unpopular, or at best ignored. Your face is in the newspaper or on TV every day, and then suddenly … nothing. That’s either because you’ve become so ubiquitous that the media needs a new version of you to take your place, or needs to give a different – most probably negative – side of you to maintain your notoriety. And there’s a constant conveyor belt of people who will take your place. Popularity has a shelf-life.

For whatever reason, the media paints certain people in a certain way and deliberately skates over elements of their lives or personalities that don’t fit the image they want to portray. Take George Michael, when he was alive. The amount of charity work George did was extraordinary, but the media focus only ever seemed to be on his sexuality and private life. It’s the same with Elton John, who has done some astonishing work with AIDS charities. But that’s never the focus.

The key is to avoid being swayed by either extreme. Don’t get carried away by the praise and buy into the notion that you’re some kind of national treasure, and in the same way don’t take any notice when they cast you aside. But to be fair, it’s so much easier said than done, because it happens to young, impressionable people, and it can be heart-warming to read complimentary things about yourself. The problem is that this persuades you to emotionally invest in the opinions of these people, which then sets you up for the fall.

My agent would always tell me not to worry about what the papers said. They didn’t know me as well as I knew myself, so it didn’t matter if they said I’d played well or played badly, just as long as I could judge myself how I’d played. And whatever they wrote became fish and chip paper the following day anyway. I never really set my stall on what anyone said if I didn’t know them or respect them as an expert on me or goalkeeping.

But for some people it does make a massive difference, because their careers become defined by how often they’re on the front page of newspapers, and so the nature of the coverage creates a huge pressure on them. I honestly don’t know how that type of celebrity copes, and I know that plenty don’t. Popularity is a very odd concept, but you have to remember that nothing about you needs to change to meet the supposed standards they set for you. If they like you, fine. If they don’t like you, fine. If you want to change, fine. But you have to stay true to yourself, not some version of you that they’ve constructed.

It’s easy to see why the English media and English fans hype up young English footballers. What they’re doing is selling a dream. They’re not just hyping you up, they’re pushing the idea that you could be the answer for the country and will finally take England back to where they think the team belongs. Then when you inevitably fail to live up to that unrealistic hype, you get flak.

Take Tom Davies at Everton. He comes into the team at the age of eighteen and tries his bollocks off, so everyone says, ‘Oh, he gets it, he’s a breath of fresh air, he’s the future.’ Then when he suffers a period of patchy form, like every young player does, or the team isn’t performing so well, it’s, ‘He’s shit, get him out of the team.’ By the age of twenty-one he’s already gone through that entire cycle and now has to move on. Judge Tom Davies on the situation he was put into, the lack of help he got from senior pros in the team, the changing managers, the fact that he’s a bloody kid.

How hard is that for him to deal with? He’s still learning and developing as a player and person, but now he has so much piled on top of him and he’s having to do it all in the public eye. How strong do you have to be to manage that and come out level-headed the other side?

It can be enough to break a kid. They might start to shy away from the ball, scared of the criticism that they’ll face if they make a mistake. They might play it safe, which is against their natural instincts and so reduces them as a player. They might go and mark someone when they don’t have the ball so they don’t get given it. And to top it all, they’ll get groaned at by 40,000 people if it goes wrong. But supporters don’t seem to care. They just think, ‘Oh well, we can just go out and buy someone for £40 million anyway.’